Meta description is an onsite SEO element you need to have for every page. For each meta description, you should have the answer to what the user is thinking: “what’s in it for me?”. At this point, you must differentiate yourself from the competitors and bring to the fore your value proposition. Before you make any decision, make sure you’ve searched the meta description that represents the best option from all that you could possibly think of.

Identifying Related Relevant Terms To Use In Your Content By Doing A TF-IDF Analysis Of The Top Ranked Pages For Any Query
With the TF*IDF formula, you can identify in which proportion certain words within a text document or website are weighted compared to all potentially possible documents. Apart from the keyword density, this formula can be used for OnPage optimisation in order to increase a website’s relevance in search engines.
Although it’s known that TF-IDF has been used to index pages, there hasn’t been a popular tool offering it to identify relevant term variances of our topics that we should be using. This information can be used to improve our site relevance for other terms our audience uses.
OnPage.org includes a handy TF-IDF tool in their on-page analysis and monitoring platform, which can be used to identify more term variances or combinations that our competitors are already using, but we still aren’t (by analyzing both the top 15 page results and our own desired page to rank with). By focusing on terms related to our main keywords, we can increase our site content’s relevance for the desired topic.

Visualizing Your Site’s Internal Linking
I have written in the past about visualizing a site’s pages and links as a graph to facilitate the analysis of a website’s internal linking, which was doable but took a lot of effort. The process required exporting the URLs crawled, then processing them with visualization tools.
This has now been made easy by the “Visualizer” functionality of OnPage.org. It not only allows you to automatically generate the internal link graph of any site, but it provides functionalities to browse, filter the number, show the relationship of links, and show only the nodes (or pages) that follow certain pattern.
This can be extremely helpful to better understand how a site is internally linked, the cardinality of the links, if there are any “orphan pages” or areas of the sites that are not connected with the rest, etc.

1. Clean Your Site of Duplicate Content
Since duplicate content is not the most orthodox SEO practice, if it’s the case, you should start cleaning your site, so you don’t get penalized by Google. A quick way to identify that is by accessing tools to check your site. Some of the most used tools for checking duplicate content are Copyscape and Siteliner.
Using canonical tags is another way to prevent having duplicate content. If, for example, your site is www.hairoil.net so might be hairoil.net, hairoil.net/index.html or www.hairoil.net/index.html. You need to use the rel=canonical tag only for one URL. You should use the rel=canonical tag to give a hint to Google to know that the sites are one and the same. Below you can find the code to set the URL you mark as canonical:

2. Track Keywords – Craft a List of Keywords to Verify Rankings
You want to rank as high as possible so you should always track the keywords that matter in order to see how your site is performing. First, you need to research and make a list with the keywords you wish to rank for. You don’t have to check them manually. There are lots of tools that can help you with that. After that, you need to keep them in a consistent system in order to monitor them, even daily if possible. You can use a Rank Tracker Tool to do so as it’s a time and money saver.

Each line represents the performance for each monitored keyword. On the bottom you can select the period; if you hover over on each line, it will show you the keyword, the position, the URL and the date. To see the trending lines, you must add the keywords first. Here you can find the guide.
Final Thoughts
Off-page SEO has its own importance, but don’t forget about the on-page SEO activities. No matter how strong your off-page is, without proper on-page SEO you may not get a higher ranking in SERPs. You need to have a fast loading website, and SEO optimized hosting can help you to achieve that.
And, the list does not end here! There are many more areas to explore by yourself. Keep one thing in mind: the more high authority websites you have referring to you and talking about you, the more chance you have to rank higher.
Mustaasam Saleem is a WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways – A Managed WordPress Hosting Cloud Platform, where he actively works in learning and sharing knowledge with the WordPress Community. When he is not working behind his computer screen, you can find him playing squash with his friends, or defending in Football and listening to music.
Sources:
https://searchengineland.com/7-key-seo-activities-can-now-automated-223471
https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/12703/seo-tasks/
https://optinmonster.com/off-page-seo/
SEO activities
Use your long-tail keywords to create blog posts or web pages that explain the specific topics within the pillars you’ve selected. Together, all of your long-tail keywords create a cluster around a pillar topic. Search engine algorithms depend on the relationships between clusters to connect users with the information they’re looking for.

12 SEO Techniques You Need to Be Using in 2022
Below are the SEO techniques that you should be paying attention to in order to increase your site’s organic traffic in 2022. You won’t just find on-page SEO tactics here, but off-page ones as well. By working on some of these SEO best practices you’ll be able to work on improving your visibility and traffic.
When you take the time to figure out what’s working for the websites you compete against on the SERPs, you can take your analysis to the next level and understand why this approach is working before using this insight to inform your own approach.
One effective starting point is to find your competitors’ best-performing pages so that you can develop a picture of where their organic traffic is coming from, and what it’s being driven by. Analyzing your competitors’ top pages can point you in the direction of things like


This is simply a way to find out the pages that are driving the most traffic to competing websites. You’ll need to take this insight to the next level to figure out why these pages perform and how you can form a strategy that steals some of this traffic.
This works because it helps you to determine potential areas to focus your efforts on at a page-level, rather than at a specific keyword-level. This exercise can also help you to find other websites that compete against your own, too, that you perhaps hadn’t considered to be a competitor.

3. Update, Upgrade and Republish Old Blog Posts






Best SEO Examples
As mentioned above, there are a variety of different things you can do for your business to enact your SEO strategy. Below we’ll go over some examples of what this looks like in practice that you can use as inspiration for your own processes.
1. Writing compelling meta descriptions.

This is a high-quality meta description because it lets Google know exactly what the page contains, helping your content surface in the correct search results and helping audiences understand exactly what they’re about to click on.
2. Getting content backlinks and inbound links.
A backlink, also called an inbound link, is when another website links back to your website or blog content. It’s usually placed as a hyperlink on a string of text that relates to your content and, when clicked, they’re taken to your site.
Backlinks are an effective SEO tool because they show search engines that your content is authoritative and relevant, helping you rank higher in SERPs. The image below is an example of a blog post from Kicksta that has a backlink to a HubSpot Blog post.

3. Optimizing your site pages for page speed.
4. Local SEO
Local SEO is improving search engine visibility for your business’s location. An effective local SEO strategy will surface your content in search queries from customers in your local area, letting them know your business is there to meet their needs.
The image below is a SERP result for “best restaurants Brooklyn.” The three businesses that appear in results have an optimized Google My Business profile that contains information that helps it surface in results for Brooklyn-area restaurants.
SEO Process
1. Historically optimize your content.
Devote some time each month to updating old blog posts with new and up-to-date information to continue ranking in SERPs. You can also use this time to add any SEO best-practices that weren’t initially addressed, like missing image alt text.
2. Look out for changing keywords and new search intent.
After a few months, track how your blog posts are ranking, and which keywords they’re ranking for. This can help you adjust subheadings and copy to leverage new search intent that your audience may be interested in.
3. Add more editorial value to your old content.
Sometimes, you’ll find that a post is completely out of date. In this scenario, you should go beyond the average historical SEO update and give it a full refresh. You can do this by updating out of date information and statistics, incorporating new sections for added depth, and adding quotes or original data to give the post more referral traffic.
4. Create a monthly content plan.
To keep up with your SEO strategy, it can be helpful to create and refine a monthly content plan. You can place it into a spreadsheet, and your teams can track accordingly. The list below is an example of a content monthly content plan that takes the above steps into account.
Sources:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-techniques/
https://backlinko.com/seo-techniques
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-strategy
SEO activities
Google takes many factors into account when ranking your website, one of them being the time spent on the page (or dwell time). If users are bouncing from your page within seconds of arriving, it signals to Google that it’s not the content their users are looking for.

On-Page SEO Elements
Content Elements
Content elements refer to the elements within your site copy and content. In this section, we’ll focus mostly on crafting high-quality page content that benefits your visitors and tells Google that your website provides value.
1. High-Quality Page Content
The first step to creating high-quality content is choosing relevant keywords and topics. Conduct keyword research by searching Google for terms and seeing what surfaces for competitors and other websites. You can also use tools like Ahrefs, AnswerthePublic, and UberSuggest.
Page content is your opportunity to communicate value to Google and your site visitors; it’s the heart of the on-page SEO process. All other on-page SEO elements stem from high-quality page content, so invest ample resources to develop and optimize it.
HTML Elements
2. Page Titles

3. Headers
Headers, also known as body tags, refer to the HTML element , , , and so on.

4. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are the short page descriptions that appear under the title in search results. Although it’s not an official ranking factor for search engines, it can influence whether or not your page is clicked on — therefore, it’s just as important when doing on-page SEO.

5. Image Alt-text
Image alt-text is like SEO for your images. It tells Google and other search engines what your images are about . which is important because Google now delivers almost as many image-based results as they do text-based results.
6. Structured Markup
Structured markup is the key behind those featured snippets, knowledge panels, and other content features you see when you search for something on Google. It’s also how your specific page information shows up so neatly when someone shares your content on social media.

Site Architecture Elements
Site architecture elements refer to the elements that make up your website and site pages. How you structure your website can help Google and other search engines easily crawl the pages and page content.
7. Page URLs
Your page URLs should be simple to digest for both readers and search engines. They are also important when keeping your site hierarchy consistent as you create subpages, blog posts, and other types of internal pages.

8. Internal Linking
Also, the longer visitors are on your website, the more time Google has to crawl and index your site pages. This ultimately helps Google absorb more information about your website and potentially rank it higher on the search engine results pages.
9. Mobile Responsiveness

10. Site Speed

Technical/Offpage SEO Tips for 2022
1. Eliminate Spammy Backlinks
It used to be that backlinks were the hidden treasure of SEO. It’s true that backlinks are still a major ranking factor for Google, but the quality of those backlinks is now more important than ever before.
In 2021, Google rolled out another algorithm update that targeted and devalued bad backlinks. While no sites were individually penalized in the process, it stopped counting a lot of backlinks that many sites had grown accustomed to which affected rankings.
If you’re a website owner, you’ve probably received some requests for backlinks in the past. Sometimes they will offer to pay you to do so. In almost all cases, the requests come from website owners whose site has a lower domain authority score than yours or might be using shady SEO practices.
It is very important to vet all backlink requests, like you would with content sources, to make sure they won’t negatively impact your site. How can you know what sites are linking to you and how you compare to your competition? With my backlink checker tool. Simply enter the domain URL and receive a complete overview of your backlink profile:


2. Build Your Brand
Since the late 2000s, Google has increasingly put an emphasis on brands. In particular, they look for brand signals as a way to weed out misinformation to provide more trustworthy results for each search. This makes it a critical ranking factor.

When a brand is consistently represented across all of their platforms, revenue can increase by up to 23 percent. Branding also makes it easier to present your values and increase customer loyalty. 89 percent of customers are willing to stay loyal to brands who share their values.
3. Create Thought-Leadership and Strategic Content
Once you have solid, pillar content (i.e., content that targets relevant keywords) on your website, it’s time to think more strategically. You want to be more than just an information site, but an authoritative one. You can do so with thought-leadership and strategic content.
In fact, 54 percent of decision-makers say they spend more than one hour per week reading thought leadership content relevant to their business. At the same time, 71 percent say that less than half of what they read gives them valuable insights
This means there is still a massive opportunity with this content. It requires you to look ahead and answer questions that aren’t even being asked yet. You want to speak directly with industry leaders and subject matter experts by getting ahead of the current state of things.
4. Diversify Your Backlink Profile
An Ahfrefs study that looked at more than 1 billion web pages found that 66.31 percent of them had zero referring domains and 26.29 percent of them only had one to three referring domains. Less than 0.1 percent of sites had more than 100 referring domains which is pretty eye-opening when you stop to think about it.

5. Use Subject Matter Experts to Increase Your EAT Score
An EAT score is one of the most important factors when determining page quality. While you don’t have to be an expert or authority on each topic you write about, you should be emulating those individuals to create content that gets a higher score.
47 percent of buyers will generally read three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative. Connecting with subject matter experts or emulating their content increases the chances of a buyer engaging with your content before moving to the next stage.
Whether you’re creating thought-leadership content yet or not, you can still look to subject matter experts for help. While interviews with such people are best, they’re not the only way to “borrow” their authority.
You can also link to interviews done by other content creators, insert quotes from subject matter experts in your posts, or highlight other content forms the subject matter has done such as videos, podcasts, or infographics.
Bad SEO Practices to Avoid in 2022
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the act of stuffing as many keywords, both direct and related, into a piece of content as possible. The idea is that the more keywords an article has, the more relevant the content will appear and the higher it’ll rank on SERPs. The exact opposite is true, though.
2. Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization occurs when two or more pages on your site are targeting the same main keyword. This is common on newer websites where the owner may think it’s better to split up larger pieces of content in order to create more pages.
For example, if the target keyword is “meringue” and they create one post on “How to Make the Perfect Meringue” and another post on “X Common Mistakes When Making Meringue.” To avoid cannibalization, a larger post should be created that includes both of those post titles as H2s. This is known as pillar content.
3. Duplicate Content
4. Exact Match Anchor Text

5. Spammy Link Building
There are some obvious offenders, like link directories, blog comments, paid links, and link schemes. You should also reevaluate the relationship you have with any referring domains. Do they have good linking practices? Do they use only white hat SEO tactics? The answers to these two questions will go a long way in informing you of whether the continued relationship will be beneficial or detrimental to your backlink profile.
Sources:
https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33655/a-step-by-step-guide-to-flawless-on-page-seo-free-template.aspx
https://neilpatel.com/blog/10-advanced-seo-techniques-thatll-double-your-search-traffic/
https://delante.co/seo-strategy-how-to-make-your-activities-consistent/